


The Color of Helicopter Seeds

by thegodswelost



Series: The Little Things [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 10, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Rowena MacLeod, Castiel & Sam Winchester Friendship, Castiel Thinks In Colors, Castiel in the Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Castiel is Not Okay (Supernatural), Cure for the Mark of Cain (Supernatural), Cursed Castiel (Supernatural), Dean Winchester is Protective of Castiel, Depressed Castiel (Supernatural), Depressed Sam Winchester, Falling Angel Castiel (Supernatural), Gen, Hurt Castiel (Supernatural), Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Memory Loss, No Amara (Supernatural), Quote: All I'm Getting From You is Colors, Rowena MacLeod's Attack Dog Spell, Stolen Angelic Grace (Supernatural), Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:47:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25396384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegodswelost/pseuds/thegodswelost
Summary: What happens when it's not Rowena who has to sacrifice what she loves to cure the Mark of Cain, but someone with a connection to Dean? There's a blood brother and an angel with a profound bond just standing by and they really shouldn't be making big decisions like this when Dean isn't there to stop them.
Relationships: Castiel & Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Series: The Little Things [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1839388
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	1. What makes a fall a fall?

**Author's Note:**

> I have more ideas for this and more chapters planned and half-written, but no idea when I will update, do not expect anything soon. I hope that it isn't too confusing to follow even though it sort of shifts between present and past/flashback.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happens when it's not Rowena who has to sacrifice what she loves to cure the Mark of Cain, but someone with a connection to Dean? There's a blood brother and an angel with a profound bond just standing by and they really shouldn't be making big decisions like this when Dean isn't there to stop them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have more ideas for this and more chapters planned and half-written, but no idea when I will update, do not expect anything soon. I know this is confusing to read because it's all out of order time-wise, so I've added numbers to each scene to let you know how everything unfolds linearly, hopefully it helps.

(1) A wobble is inevitable when he lands, his balance nowhere to be found. The curse is lost on a tired tongue. Beneath his shoes slush fallen leaves, old and sodden with rain. They cling to the leather, the edges peeling like worn price tags. “I still don’t understand.”

The boy is silent, has been for the minutes Castiel has known him. A hand points up at the branch that Castiel just jumped down from. The palm is scraped, red with torn skin and clotting blood. The boy had fallen while running, his hands bearing the brunt of his crash to the sidewalk.

And Castiel, catching it in the corner of his eye, had shifted his gaze to his right, searching for a familiar presence. For Hannah. When his eyes found an empty space beside him, his shoes became a penny heavier. 

The boy stood up, squinting at his hands, rubbing at his knee, frowning. And then he broke back into a run, feet tearing past the sidewalk and into the grass, crashing to a stop beside a maple tree. 

Castiel lands with a wobble, faded brown leaves slushing beneath his sodden leather shoes, a hidden book beneath his coat slipping but sticking and refusing to fall. “I still don’t understand.”

A scraped palm points upward. Tired eyes follow.

* * *

(5) “I climbed a tree.”

“That’s great, Cas.” The tone is gray but not the gray that Castiel likes. It’s buried in ash. In a bitter, burning pallor. It’s the gray of fiery death and not of fog. Smoke, perhaps. 

“The seeds have an interesting quality.”

Gray snaps and crackles with a pale, simmering red, half green in repugnance. “I don’t give a damn about trees and seeds, Cas. Did you find anything that can help Dean or were you just frolicking in meadows the whole time?”

Castiel is a sickly yellow, fingers gray with death, throat taut with the green of Sam’s disgusted disappointment. “I’ll keep looking.”

Sam scoffs out smoke.

* * *

(2) “There’s something in the tree?” He’d thought a cat, maybe, or a bird nest, but the branches had been sharp with emptiness when he climbed.

The boy shakes his head, blue and bright. The blue of a blanket or a coat or a smile. Warm and comforting. His voice comes out garbled and unsure, but blue all the same. “Helicopter,” he says. 

Castiel squints higher, ears tuned to the clouded sky. He shakes his head, pale with tired confusion. “There’s no helicopter.”

A torn pant leg folds as the leg inside bends. A scraped palm tears past sodden leaves and digs with a muddy, brown sound. It comes back with a fistful of broken leaves and seeds. “Helicopter,” the blue voice chops out.

The hand shoves up, the fistful thrown. Most of the debris sinks back to the mud. 

One seed, golden edges torn but the form still holding, spins instead.

* * *

(8) Muddied yellow weight swings into Castiel’s side as he shoves from the car. His hand slips into his pocket and sticks there. 

Grace, blue and white, so cold it burns, bites at his strength and balance. Theo’s grace.

Metatron is in heaven, a putrid cockroach not worth skinning for the lies he’d surely give. Not yet, anyway. The possibility is orange and faint where it crawls in the back of Castiel’s mind.

Rowena is a much more vibrant option. Crimson and oily. Like the wax of a candle that relights every time it’s blown out. She is the red of wax melting onto the table and the floor and she is simply... tiring.

Or Castiel is simply tired. His hand sticks to a little box, yellow in it’s memory and golden in the muddied present. In the echo of Sam’s gray words.

“If it isn’t the poor wee angel. Here to make a deal?” The syllables bleed with her accent. Her heels click in circles like a vulture waiting for a meal.

“The mark. Can you cure it?” The tone comes out blacker than intended. Castiel’s fingers peel from the golden box. He tapes them back on.

Wax fingers, fake in their concern and red in their intent, simmer over Castiel’s shoulder. “Maybe,” Rowena says, voice childlike beneath the lipstick. “Given the right tools.” The fingers click lower, blistering over the corners of a stolen book. “And the right incentive.”

Castiel slams her across the cobblestones and into a wall.

Her face twists in crimson hurt. Childlike. The emotions are too dramatic, too sticky and bright. 

“Can you cure it?”

“Wee bird. You’re just starving for some attention, aren’t you? And that grace…” Her tongue clicks. “But it’s alright now. I can cure you too.” The childness burns away, settling into something far more solid. “For a price.”

“Cure the mark, I’ll pay the price.” The words are gray. Gray like ash. 

“But you don’t even know—”

“I’ll pay it.” Cold, dead ash.

“Now, listen here, you stupid little fledgling, I’m tired of broken deals.” Red hair and wax hands shove. “You’re going to know what you’re getting into, and you’re going to stick with it or I’m going to stick you with the splintered bone of your favorite Winchester, understand?” Rowena is not quite fiery. She’s oily. More like kerosene than fire. Putting all the pieces into place to make sure everything else burns.

“What do you want?”

Heels click around him and the gold grows muddier with dread. “Let’s talk.”

* * *

(3) Castiel shakes his head, still squinting, always squinting. “That’s not a helicopter.”

Scraped palms, both brown and blue in their movements, scavenge through the grass and the mud. They unbury four mostly intact seeds. Wings. They look like insect wings, yellow in the warmth of rapid flutters and brittle in the blackness of singularity. Each seed looks like a wing.

The boy, bright and calm and purposed, opens a scraped empty palm and shifts two of the four seeds from one hand to the other. He holds one palm out. “For you,” he says, and blankets all the eons of an angel’s existence.

Castiel steals a yellow moment to throw maple tree seeds and watch them spin.

* * *

(9) “I don’t understand.”

A crimson insult of slow words and rolling eyes. “Let me explain it one more time. I want something  _ precious _ from you. The most precious. That’s how the spell works. Give me the one thing you love most and let me sacrifice it.”

A murky frown latches onto Sam. “You mean like a person?” The hazel hum of hope falls quiet beneath the sharpness of morality. Sam grows full of snapping orange. “You have to kill someone we love?”

Rowena melts deliberately into a sigh. “No, you neanderthals. Love comes in many forms. It could be a person, but it’ll work better with a thing because people aren’t all love, are they? I need a thing you love  _ purely _ . Either of you.”

Castiel’s form still sings of ash and death. His throat is full of dust, his feet of tired grief. “Why? Why us? Why not you?” 

“It has to come from someone with a connection to Dean,” Rowena spells out slowly, fingers circling toward Sam. “ _ You _ share his blood…”

Sam settles in humming hazel.

Rowena circles around to Castiel, her fingers clicking with a scavenger’s intent, oily with deceit. “... and  _ you _ , well… you laid claim to his soul when you freed him from Hell.”

Hazel spins into rusted brown. “You what?” 

Castiel ignores Sam, thin eyes stuck on Rowena. “That claim is long gone.”

Wax bleeds from the witch, might as well be dripping onto the floor and staining the soles of Castiel’s shoes.“So you’re telling me there is nae a profound bond between the two of you?”

Disrespect screws Castiel’s jaw taut. His fingers fist with ugly, brittle ire. 

Rowena straightens. “As I said. Either of you will do.”

The taste of hesitation is clear beneath the longing Castiel can sense from Sam. “Do you… want the impala?” Sam asks.

The witch throws a look, white in annoyance and red in impatience. The outcome is splintered pink. “Do you love it? Would you die when it died?”

Sam shakes his head just once, disappointment coloring his shoulders and muting the hazel hum.

“Then no. Something else. Something painfully precious.” Rowena’s tone grows fierce. “Something that _is_ _you_.”

A hand sticks to a yellow box. “I might have something.” The words are foggy and half formed, hidden in the depths of Castiel’s fingers.

“Might?” Her chin clicks up, eyes raising. “Let’s have it, then.”

Castiel can’t feel the movement as his hand pulls the box from his pocket. He’s too deep in fog. The contents spill onto Rowena’s hand.

Sam’s response is half scoff, half flame. “Helicopter seeds, Cas? Are you kidding me right now?”

Rowena’s smile is that of a spider sensing a tug on her web. She clicks her tongue at Sam, crimson in the find. “Don’t scoff, dearie, I can feel the power in these.” Wax fingers pat Castiel’s cheek and burn his face. “They’ll do perfectly."

She lays the seeds on the table. “Of course, that’s just what I need for the spell. If you want me to perform it, well… it’s just a wee thing, really, hardly bears mentioning.” She overacts, always does. The performance comes out childlike. 

Sam stands firm, the hazel reluctant to deepen. “Rowena.”

“I need you to kill my son.”

* * *

(4) A gray of storm clouds splinters across the blue expanse. “Where are your parents?” Castiel asks.

The boy shivers out a half response when he shrugs, his focus on the sodden leaves and seeds, his hands trying to salvage them.

“I’m told it’s unusual for children to be left untended. That’s true of bears and penguins especially, I believe.” 

The blue shivers, the warmth failing.

Cas is… learning. It’s jittery and brutal, like the purple of a bruise, but he’s learning. Every soul deserves to be saved. Every quailing color deserves to be soothed. 

Blackness weeps. Bleeds from the near corner of the earth to the distant edge of sky and the comfortable gray of a parent never comes. The gray of kindness and sweaters and old, familiar smiles. The pleasant gray. The one Castiel can never seem to find.

“Where do you live?”

Scraped palms and torn knees, bleeding with bright blue warmth. Two wings are thrown into the air and granted one last fall. “I don’t,” the boy says.

“Let me take you home.”

Two words bounce back. Blue in tone but glacial in meaning. “No home.”

* * *

(10) _No wings, no home, just a ratty, old coat_ —

The memory is blindingly white, piercing the frayed tatters of Theo’s grace and tearing through Castiel’s mind.

_ A spanner in the works _ **_—_ **

It’s painful, like an old wound ripped open deeper and deeper. A crimson grunt locks in Castiel’s throat. His feet stagger beneath the mental barrage and his hand snaps out to find support only to send a clatter of items to the floor. His coat swings open but the stolen book sticks to his side and doesn’t fall.

“Rowena,” Sam thunders. “You didn’t say the spell would do this!”

“Didn’t I? I have to kill what he loves, Sam, you said it yourself. Fortunately, most of it is already dead. There’s naught but a few wee flickers left to put out. It’ll only take a second.”

_ Nobody cares that you’re broken, Cas. Clean up your mess. _

Realization is a lead weight roped around Castiel’s ankle, wrenching him to bottomless depths he may never escape.

_ (7.5) “They’d sooner leave you to die than deal with the bother of throwing a bandaid.” _

_ Castiel’s blade drops. Just another weight. The stare is too tired to be anything else. “I know.” _

_ Crowley thinks he is onto something but he is years behind in his insight. “They don’t care about you, they’re not your friends. You’re less than a pet to them.” _

_ “I said, I know.” _

_ Crowley smiles like a prickly green cactus promising water but only with risk. “Sore spot? How many times have they cast you aside, how many times have you had to face your family alone because your so-called Winchester family didn’t give a damn? How many times have you died because of it? And Metatron, using you—” _

_ That is too recent, too purple, and Castiel is too high-strung with the thought of that still-bleeding mistake not to snap, “I didn’t know.” _

_ But Crowley smiles wider and for a moment, prickly green, he shifts from behind to ahead. “Aren’t you tired of being used, Castiel? Tired of everyone twisting you to their own devices, wringing you dry and then casting you aside? You don’t exist to them, not really. Not to Sam or Dean or the angels. Not until they need someone to take a fall.” _

_ Castiel is too tired, too weighted, too muddy. His angel blade lifts, his feet slushing forward. The tired stare molds and blackens. Deadens. “I will not ask again. Rowena. I know you’ve been keeping tabs on her.” _

_ The King of Hell takes a shuffling, slow step back, palms raised in submission. He doesn’t have the talent to best Castiel while trapped like this and he knows it. “I can help you, Castiel. Forget the Winchesters. You don’t exist to them, why should they exist to you?” _

_ Castiel trudges forward like a ghostly pile of bones, blade lifting. “Where?” _

_ Desperation forces a string of green temptation. “You’re dying, I can feel it. That stolen grace is almost gone.” _

_ A temptation too long dead to be felt. “I know.” _

_ “I can help you.” _

_ “Or I can die.” The blade lifts, the weight of a mountain locked behind it. Shame and penance ring a violet hue above the grace that Castiel feels rotting away inside him.  _

_ Crowley thought he was smart, thought he could sway an angel’s loyalties. But Castiel hasn’t been an angel for a long time. Not since he pulled Dean from perdition and sank right back down. _

* * *

(6) “I climbed a tree.” The police were kind enough to take the boy. He won’t be out in this cold tonight, won’t grow sodden from the rain that Castiel can feel waiting to fall.

_ That’s great, Cas. _

Castiel ignores the smoldering echo. “You need to understand, I… I’ve been falling.”

The sky is empty and Castiel can’t be sure who he’s pretending to tell. A singing hazel Sam or a calm and forested Hannah or an absent gray father. Even the warm, green Dean who may no longer exist.

“The earth used to be a giant rift.”

Castiel is small and bruised and unsure. He doesn’t know what he’s trying to say. “The trees came before the humans. They formed inside the rift and they burrowed toward the sun, monstrous and unyielding. The bristlecone pine, the cypress, the sequoia. They spread by scattering their seeds to the wind.”

* * *

(11) _You can’t stay._

Can’t stay alive well enough to be wanted. Can’t stop tripping on leather bound shoes that stick like old price tags to the ground. Castiel has been marked down. Again.

Hazel hums around him, calling his name, sharp with concern before it dulls down to nothing.

“I climbed a tree.”

It feels important. Gray with importance, like a fog has overtaken every other thing and this is all there is. All that matters. 

No one is there to hear it. It’s just Castiel, alone in the fog with a painfully important thing that no one else has time or want for.

“The seeds have an interesting quality.” 

His legs turn to fog beneath him but the floor never comes. A sliver of hazel, jagged with horror, has hold of his shoulders. And then his coat. Then his head. A glacial breath, “Cas?"

“I climbed a tree.”

Castiel waits for the gray of disapproval to slice through the pale fog. It never comes.

A calm warmth, green in sincerity, spins through the air, accompanied for a brief moment by a wonderful, little yellow hum. “You told me. Cas, look at me, can you hear me?”

The yellow is muddied into gold, the green into something blue with cold. 

“I climbed a tree.”

The gray overhead grows thick with rain trying desperately not to fall. “I know. I know you did.” Gray-brown eyes find a book and confusion bleeds onto a clouded face. It sticks like the bruise of a price tag.

“You have to understand, I… I’ve been falling.” 

The eyes peel off the book. “Cas.”

“I can’t stop falling.”

* * *

(7) The police took the boy home. In solitude, Castiel’s words are almost a prayer. A prayer to a lost god and an absent father.

“The seeds…They fall gracefully. Beautifully. They were built to fall, born to fall,  _ forced to fall _ , but they fall like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” 

He can see them, feel them spinning goldenly; spiralling on waves of breath, on the inhales and exhales of the trees and creatures alike. Gliding from the heavens to the earth as though they love every moment of it, purposed and content and proud in their plummet. The yellow moment stretches itself into Castiel’s fingertips and feet, and the mountain of pennies he’s collected cascades to the side and leaves him weightless.

“They fall like they’re flying.”

* * *

(12) “Rowena!” The purple is roaring, brutal, and thundery.

Oily crimson clicks and clicks and laughs. “It’s just pathetic, isn’t it? This thing he loves. It’s naught but a sad little moment. Hardly a moment. It’s just an idea, really. What a pitiful existence that  _ this _ is what he clings to when his whole world is burning in front of him.”

“But I—I climbed.” It feels so very important, and still, it’s slipping away. “I climbed.”

“I know, Cas, you told me.”

“No, you didn’t...” if he could feel his head through this fog, Castiel is sure it would shake. “You didn’t want me to climb.”

Sam gives a pained, muddied sound. “I didn’t know what you were talking about. It was such a small thing, I thought...”

“Small is all I have.” Slipping, slipping, slipping. Sliding backwards through a world of smoke and ash. Castiel’s foggy fingers grasp a marred, muddy sleeve. “I can’t stop falling.”

“Rowena.” The purple is bruised and sharp and tainted with something like leaden shame. “You’re killing him.”

A vulture circles overhead, waiting in a crimson click. “I’m killing what he loves. Lucky for you, he’s not on that list. Not even close to it. He’ll live. What’s left of him, anyway. And Dean, being the recipient, will also live. You, however…” Wax melts off the table and pools beneath a bruised hazel, one spark away from bursting into flames. “Well, I’d worry if I were you, Samuel.”

“Samuel.” Blue washes through Castiel’s fingers. Their grip tightens on a sleeve just starting to turn to ash. Seeds and trees fall to fog. A name sticks like mud and price tags. “Samuel. The prophet who stood on a wall of stone and did not fall. Samuel; God has heard. Samuel will not fall.”

“Ow. Cas, what are you—”

Grace, stolen and angry and biting, rises in a wall of flame and memory. Sam will live only if he is lost to Castiel. A hazel song, sincere and loyal and strong, is wrested from his grasp, leaving only an echo of hope that fades all too quickly.

Castiel falls.

_ You can’t even die right. _

And he was meant to die trying to free Dean, though he didn’t know it at the time. Naomi only wanted to be rid of him. He wasn’t supposed to succeed, and so his success was not success but brutal failure. The two are synonymous, Castiel thinks, for they are received the very same way. 

But Castiel also thinks that maybe he didn’t fail. 

Maybe he has long been dead.

The spell slams to a sudden stop.

Theo’s grace is burning to be free. It is white and painful but not half as painful as the spell that falls from Rowena’s fervid crimson lips. The moment of peace never blossoms. One curse lifts and another one falls like an ethereal blade. 

Crimson bleeds over Castiel’s skin and eyes, and deeper, deeper, deeper, it wrings talons around his muddied yellow core. Flames shiver over Theo’s grace, balking at the touch and peeling away. But they stick to Castiel. They melt into his muscles and click in circles around his mind.

A man, echoing with hazel, slams into a jittery, brutal purple, his form loud with the predecessor to concern. “Cas?”

Castiel doesn’t belong to himself anymore. He’s not sure he ever did. 

“Rowena, what did you do? This wasn’t the deal!” A bruised voice. “Cas?!”

Wax fingers scorch Castiel’s cheek. “I’m sure you had every intention of honoring our deal. But why take chances?”

Red. Red. Red. Castiel is buried beneath it.

Charlie was red but not like this. Never like this. She was the red of sandstone and apples and sunrises. Her red was comforting and life-giving and brilliant. She was the Fall—the Autumn—full of pumpkins and fiercely changing leaves and season after season, she held life. 

Rowena is the red of too-bright lipstick and melted candles and circling vultures and Castiel cannot breathe while buried under all her rot.

He doesn’t want to breathe.

A ringing echo of something sounds; when the man across from them moves a ghostly thing echoes. “Cas. Castiel. Look at me, buddy.”

A mountain of crimson necrosis laughs through Castiel’s core. “He doesn’t know you, Samuel, you don’t exist to him. Ironic, isn’t it, after what we just saw?” Rowena. Red and sticky Rowena. “How does it feel?”

The man’s soul spins into a violet hue and fractures beneath the weight. “Cas, look at me. I’m gonna fix this, I swear. I’ll fix this.” He’s bleeding sincerity and shame and Castiel is drowning in red.

A click of one high-heeled shoe followed by another, painted fingernails burning venom trails over Castiel’s cheek. “Come along, angel. We have things to do.” 

At his side, a dead book slips but sticks and doesn’t fall.


	2. A Want to Fight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rowena has Cas, the stolen grace causes problems, and we see moments from when Dean still had the Mark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This isn't the greatest chapter but it does set up a lot of things that need to happen and hopefully it's not too hard to follow, it's much more linear than the last one though there are still two overlapped storylines. We will get a lot more Sam and Dean in the next chapter, though I can't promise when I will update. I do have a lot of ideas for this work and I hope to finish it sooner rather than later.

The fists don’t beat him black and blue like they did the Steins. Dean’s fists. Dean’s fists don’t beat him black and blue.

Castiel _can’t_ , and the can’t is a cemented, white-knuckled grip in his chest. Can’t watch Dean murder the world. He doesn’t fight back. Let Dean murder him first. Let the fists beat him to nothingness.

A blackly hazel voice asks Dean to stop but that is Sam’s. Sam’s hope, Sam’s need, Sam’s suffering that climbs up the rot of Castiel’s throat and asks for the bitter, ashy, putrid orangeness of life. 

Asks for Dean to not be too far gone.

The fists don’t beat him black and blue. They beat the clinging hazel hum of Sam that was keeping Cas alive.

They beat him colorless.

* * *

A stolen book is fisted against Castiel’s fractured rib cage, stuck like a bruise. Just another part of him. Just one more part of Castiel that doesn’t belong to himself. 

Time passes in a blood-red haze. Castiel’s skin is growling, his hands biting, his grace burning. Something of him is dead and rotting. Hands and blades and reddened eyes and stolen grace all fight and fight and fight.

But Castiel? Castiel is dead and dead things do not fight.

Rowena feeds. She clicks her tongue and points a talon and a stolen vessel once called Jimmy tears through everything in its path. Tears and tears as though it can rip the red haze apart at the seams. 

The seams bleed wax. The wax burns.

A demon, tinted crimson, gets torn apart a mite too fast and Rowena is starved of intel. She spins to feed on Cas instead. Means to, anyway, but at the touch she flinches back, so red she’s white, and hisses at the heat. “What is that?”

Blood-red skin growls.

Her painted talons click forward again, searching out the stain of life in Castiel’s death. Theo’s grace, blue so cold it burns, roars out flame. It fights. 

But Castiel? Castiel _can’t_.

* * *

Unmarred, unclenched, unraised. Castiel’s fingers find the floor and never form a single bitter, bruising, cobalt fist. 

An angel blade—not Castiel’s because Castiel’s was lost the first time he was torn apart—falls. Falls too far to the left and stabs into the tired cover of a book, blindingly blank when it should probably be blue with mercy. It doesn’t feel like mercy, it feels like a miss, like collateral damage. Like abuse to a kind, weeping, innocent thing.

The black-red echo of Cain’s fallen deal stains Dean’s forearm; the only mark to otherwise unmarred skin because Castiel is busy rotting beneath a mountainous cement tombstone of white-knuckled _can’t_. 

An angel blade stabs the blue from a book, boots clack across a familiar floor, and Castiel’s insides fist against the thought of following.

Let Dean leave. Let Dean leave Castiel on the bloody bunker floor as though he’s just another body.

Perhaps he is.

And there’s a brief, brief moment, orange and violet and shamefully desperate, when Castiel considers pulling the blade from the book and correcting the shot.

The ringing of a hazel phone call, he thinks later, doesn’t fully stop him.

* * *

“That’s not yours, that’s not... _you._ What—who is that?” Rowena’s voice has misplaced its childlike, play-acting quality. Something deeply real and crimson, always crimson, spins in her tone. 

“Theo,” Castiel growls. Theo is brutally blue. The memory of him, however, is stained with purple suffering.

“I don’t know a Theo,” Rowena says. She’s clicking in circles, waiting on wings of death for an opportunity to present itself. “Was he very powerful?”

Castiel tastes of ash and death. “A seraphim.”

Rowena clicks. “Ah. And what did you do, exactly, to achieve _this_?” Her fingers, nails painted red, sift through Castiel and poke at Theo’s biting grace. Castiel’s senses are too full of dust and decay to feel it.

“I stole him. Ate him.”

“Interesting.” Another poke, another snap of Theo’s sharp blue bite. “He seems volatile.”

A blood-red haze burns the emotion from the response that Rowena tugs through Castiel’s lips. “What’s left of him is eating me.”

“Yes, I can see that, he’s mucking up my spell. How do we get rid of him?”

Theo is blue, Rowena is red, and Castiel, well, he’s rotting and—

“Let him eat me.” 

Him and Rowena and everything else. Castiel exists only to be fed upon.

Beneath the blood-red haze, a ghostly soft golden-brown thing echoes in disagreement. 

But that belongs to someone else. Someone—

The thought is buried by a feathered torrent of wax.

* * *

“Sam.”

The hazel is half muted in staticky gray. “Cas, did you find Dean?”

Castiel’s eyes are clinging like curled fingers to the edges of a murdered book. Surely that book was more valued, more wanted, more useful than Castiel has ever been. Could ever be. 

Violet guilt, thick and smoldering, moves Castiel’s hand to wrench the blade free. He hides the book in his coat, forestalling Sam’s notice of it. Beaten and bruised, he shakes his head. “I let him go.”

Dean would grow fiery but Sam just slips a little further into ash. “Why?”

The book sits awkwardly against Castiel’s side, torn and murky and painful. More books, all hideously—alienly—green are splayed about the room, and bodies beside them.

Dean is lost so far beyond the warm green drumming of music and cars and thundery smiles. Beyond the comfortable grayness of age and the brown of ache and the plum of pain and the spinning, reaching, fisted feel of love.

Dean is lost so far beyond human things he might as well be God. 

“Sam, I don’t know if… I don’t know if we can save him.” 

The muddied gray words that follow beat Castiel a little more corpse-like.

* * *

The falling doesn’t stop, Castiel realizes. After the burial, you sink.

He stumbles—staggers, more like—and the oily vulture that is Rowena shifts from a click to a clack. A clack like a hammer on a nail. Like serrated, snapping red on tarnished yellow. Like teeth on tired, tired bones.

What’s left of Castiel is whitely certain he deserves it. Is glad that for once he is the nail and not the hammer.

Her phone rings and the red slips for a moment into a marred and weary orange. Rowena clacks, “Call one more time without my son’s head on a plate and you’ll be peeling your pet’s eyes from your bunker wall, his skin from your ceiling, and his organs from your squelching, bloody shoes, do I make myself clear? Wonderful.”

The phone melts away and the spiteful clack slams into Castiel. “As for you, tweetie-pie, you will find a way to rid me of that meddling grace or I will give it a boost and clap when it breaks you apart.” The talons and beak are almost indistinguishable. Rowena hisses out a spell and tears and tears and tears at the muddied conglomeration of Castiel and the stolen thing once called Theo. 

And it seems that in the crimson haze where nothing else is felt, pain thrives and breeds and bites, all too familiar with the sour taste of Castiel.

But it is amusing and foolish of her, Castiel thinks, when Theo’s grace chomps through Rowena’s bloody haze and grants him one moment of thought; to threaten to kill a thing she needs alive. 

And terribly, yellowly foolish of her to threaten to kill a thing that is already dead.

While she snaps at him, while Theo burns like acid and sickness, something falls. 

Voices, loud and watery and thundered, like storm clouds pounding in torrents, fighting to climb the peak of a mountain. Voices, one familiar and one painfully half. Half familiar, half heard, half nothing but a ghostly rattle of bones and daggers, stabbing through Castiel’s skin and flaying his mind from his skull. 

_I’ll fix this, Cas, I swear._

_Fight it. Fight her, Cas. Come home you stupid angel. Just come home._

The amusement falls, swallowed for a moment by a fistful of confusion.

* * *

His leather shoes are sticky with blood. Castiel peels them up, unsure if the blood is Jimmy’s or the Steins. It’s not his. Never his. 

Angel radio is on, each sound more orangely depressing than the last.

_I will tear what is left of your feathers out myself, Castiel._

_Why? Why did you do this to me?_

_We will never stop hunting you._

_I can’t survive like this. I don’t want to survive like this._

_You will pay in blood for what you have done to us. Vile, loathesome, hateful thing._

_My wings won’t stop burning. How do I stop the burning? They’re gone but they won’t stop burning._

Sam’s disappointment, muddy and bloody and raw, echoes out a perfect purple harmony. Or perhaps it is white. White with empty misery and sharp, glacial failure and blame. Blame so sickly yellow beneath the white that it sticks like a gas ‘n sip price tag. The tag of something that is too much trouble to keep, of something too broken to sell.

The fisted death above blood-stuck soles of tired, leather shoes can’t stop listening.

Castiel walks. Half in prayer to a half-lost god, and hopes that when he finally stops falling he bursts to a deathlike blank.

* * *

Her tiredness is corrosive. Caustic. 

“I only needed one seed for the mark spell. And I thought to myself, Rowena, dear, you have one seed left over, you could put an angel guard dog up your sleeve and if you have an angel guard dog up your sleeve, you might as well _use_ him.” 

She snaps another spell Castiel’s direction. It writhes against the blue of Theo’s grace, burning, always burning, before it’s swallowed in the roar of a terribly wronged thing. 

“And I had all these gorgeous ideas. With an angel at my side, I thought, I can do whatever I want, I can _be_ whoever I want. For god’s sake, I was practicing my signature; Rowena, Queen of Hell, such a lovely title. And what do I get instead? A broken pet and a couple of angry little boys.”

Another spell stabbed through Castiel’s growling skin. 

“As if they care about you, kitten. We both know they’d sacrifice you for Dean any day, and they _did_ , so I don’t know why they’re bothering, really.”

Theo bites and Castiel thinks a thought of blue. “They?”

“Dean and Samuel, of course. The Winchesters.”

But Castiel doesn’t catch those last four words. He’s busy feeling the piercing, screaming, muddy, bloody sound of _Samuel._ He’s busy falling through a mustard yellow gas of agony.

Rowena falls back into her click. A circling hum, an oily grin. “Interesting.”

Corrosive. Caustic. Gleeful and venomous in the glimpse of opportunity. “I think I may return you after all,” she clicks.

* * *

A park falls into place before Castiel’s prickly, hateful gaze. 

His feet slush to a bloody stop though the blood is long since gone.

An empty space on every side, a monument of pennies adding to the worthless weight of him. He stares blankly at the green grass and the brown tree trunks and the cold, hollow metal that forms the towering supports for a swing. 

He stares and wonders, deep and buried and white, how far, how long, how grayly possible is it for him to walk himself into nothing?

On the sidewalk up ahead, a little boy falls.

* * *

A stab of stairs and muddy brown. Castiel falls into a bunker and two men rise to meet him. One known, the other not.

Rowena seethes fiery anger but beneath, her red weeps of falseness. “Why didn’t you tell me your angel was dying? What am I supposed to do with this _bomb_?”

Dean’s head jerks in confusion. “What?”

“I’m returning him, no need to thank me. I’d say this puts us square.” She clicks and turns but a gun clicks louder. 

“Witch-killing,” a man says, singing faintly of hazel. 

“Cas?” Dean is crouched beside him, reaching. A memory of black fists cracks through Castiel’s already fractured mind. He flinches back.

Something bitingly important accompanies the rotted memory. “The mark?”

Dean draws his sleeve slowly upward, his whole form screaming out a nauseating blend of angry violet regret and fearful orange concern. “It’s gone. It’s gone, Cas.”

“I let the wee tyke go, he’s yours now. You can _keep_ him.”

The gun doesn’t waver. “You’re not getting off that easy.”

A spasm of deep plum agony has Castiel’s hand fisting desperately. It tangles in Dean’s shirt, the angel’s whole body shuddering with the force of it. 

“What did you do to him?” Dean asks.

“ _That_ _?_ That wasn’t me.”

An echoing, a mirroring, a _wrenching_ flicker of hazel. “Like hell it wasn’t.”

Castiel’s mind is spritzing and breaking and reforming in jagged, painful bursts. It splinters a whine from his throat, his fingers falling to white.

“I’d stop talking, Samuel, I don’t think his mind can bear the sound.”

“What are you talking about? What’s wrong with him?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. He pulled you from his memory the way one pulls a hammer through glass.” She clacks her gaze to Dean. “To keep the wee boy from being murdered, of course, by the mark’s removal. Unfortunately, it was a rush job and, I suspect, not completed properly. Your presence is moving all those wee little shards. It’s tearing him apart.”

Green, more blue than yellow, wraps a hand around Castiel’s bone-white fingers. “Sam.” A command lies hidden in Dean’s voice.

The gun wavers, slushing in a blur of flinching mud. “I…” 

“Sam!” Dean demands, but the demands are lost to Castiel.

The muddied man disappears with the bright red witch.

“Cas,” blue-green splashes into focus. “Cas, you okay? Look at me, buddy.”

Red and brown are churning in violent disarray. Castiel blinks slowly, waiting for the feelings to subside. Instead, they simmer and spin and tear. “I don’t feel right.”

“Yeah, I bet.” 

“The mark?”

“It’s gone.”

But so is Castiel and the words fall before they reach him. Beneath his skin, Theo bites. Without the red haze, everything just seems dull and faded. Everything except the pain. Pain doesn’t fade. It peels and bites and bleeds instead.

* * *

A boy falls and Castiel wonders what he was looking for. Wonders why he would run so hard to reach it. 

A boy falls and then climbs right back up, hardly a breath spared for the pain and the dirt and loss of balance. They don’t hinder him. He finds his feet and returns to a run. 

With empty space on every side, Castiel wonders. 

* * *

“What’d she do to you, huh?” Dean is trying to pull Cas to sit. It’s the failing, Cas thinks, that puts that peach sliver of fear into his voice and his hands.

“I’m just tired.” An echo, maybe. An echo of Rowena’s control; falseness weeping through every word.

Dean sinks into peach depth. The colors stutter but his movements smooth and slow with weight. He pulls Cas up and holds him there. “Really, though. How do you feel?”

“Like I was in a blender.”

“Oh?”

“Set to puree.”

“Oh.”

“For a tomato salsa.”

Dean’s smile is small but warm. “And you’re the tomato.” The peach fades beneath a sudden drum of green. He claps Castiel on the shoulder. “Good to have you back, Cas.”

Everything dull, but the blue is starting to spin, starting to climb his throat. “What happened?”

“Sam said you, uh—”

Castiel flinches and shudders, a sudden pain searing through his organs and muscles and mind. He starts to fall back to the floor but Dean’s hands fist in the back of his trenchcoat and hold him up. 

“Sorry,” he says. And amends, “ _Someone_. Someone said that you gave Rowena some maple seeds for the mark spell. Do you remember that?”

Castiel frowns. “Maple seeds?”

“Yeah. You, uh… you climbed a tree? And you loved…” Dean trails off, his colors dulled, twisting in confusion. Green and peach and brown. “I don’t know,” he says. “But you’re back and Rowena’s here and we’ll fix it. Whatever it is.”

Castiel shakes his head, mirroring Dean’s confusion, though his is far more fogged. “Fix what?”

“I don’t know. Sam—mm one. Someone said Rowena killed everything you loved because you gave her seeds from a tree you climbed. It didn’t make any sense to me either.”

Castiel flinches at the slip in name and then tilts his head when he recovers enough to parse through the reply. “What tree?” he asks.

* * *

“I don’t understand.”

The boy grows frustrated, but grayly so. Softly so. His palms are scraped and red but he puts them on the bark of the tree and attempts to reach the lowest branch. His hands tear from the effort and Castiel hurriedly reaches out to stop him, throat thick already with the pained sound of angels and Winchesters. 

He is so tired of pain. Can’t bear anymore pain. “Don’t do that,” he says, wishing the words were some kinder color than plum. “Please don’t do that.” He peels the blood-stuck hands away and looks up, his own hands already finding the bark. “I’ll climb it.” 

Up and up and up when his feet are slushing in mud, his soul in ash and rot. “I’ll climb it.”

That’s not Sam’s voice. Not Dean’s or Metatron’s or Naomi’s or Hannah’s or God’s or the Leviathans’. 

That’s Castiel’s and Castiel’s alone. And it seems that somehow, sometimes, some unstolen things like mud and ash and rot spin themselves into a kind and graceful yellow.

His fingers fist around the first branch and Castiel climbs.

* * *

“I can fix him for you.”

Castiel isn’t supposed to be listening. He can’t stop listening.

Lightning, white and sharp beneath dark green thunder snaps, “You’re the one that broke him in the first place.”

“Who, dear.” Rowena is wholly unaffected and happily crimson.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m the one _who_ broke him in the first place. Witches are people too, you know. And I did nae break him, I simply _borrowed_.”

“He said he was a tomato salsa and you kept trying to eat him.”

“Does he look like a tomato salsa to you? The boy is mad, and that’s nothing to do with me, he’s been that way for _years_.” Her acting is getting better, more aged. 

“So why bring him back?” Hazel, more full of lightning than Dean’s thunder. A brutally unfamiliar man sending pulses of pain through Castiel’s limbs, making them shake.

Rowena clicks. “He’s not worth the trouble. You know I’ve had to move three times this week to get the angels off my back? Not to mention you two.”

“Angels?” Dean asks.

Rowena brightens and burns and clicks. “Don’t you know? They’re hunting him. Something about losing their wings and their home and everything they’ve ever cared about. And they’re so much trickier than demons. So much angrier. They’re a hard lot to lose and I’ve been keeping the wee thing safe for you. So, way I see it, you owe me.”

“We don’t owe you anything.” Screechingly blank, and Castiel’s whole form trembles with the sound it knows in fragments and slices. It’s blackly white and it comes out gray like smoldering ash. Like an avalanche of magma and torturous grief.

He’s learned the man’s name, but the name hurts more than the sound. 

“You do owe me Crowley’s head on a plate for the mark spell.” She’s playing at something. Waiting for something, and Castiel isn’t sure what. No doubt it will burn when it comes.

“You broke that deal when you took Cas.” It’s difficult, with the raging, piercing, hazeled stab, to decipher the other colors in the tone. But there’s something hurt, something black and blue, like blistered bruises, and something else. Cold, glacially so. Something of pale loss.

“And now I’m offering to fix him for you. Fix what _I_ didn’t cause, by the way. So the three of you can stand in a room together like a perfect happy family.

“We’ll find another way,” Dean says.

“And if you can’t?” Rowena clicks.

“Then we’ll know just where to find you, won’t we?”

Something spins. Gold buried beneath the flickering pulse of an unstolen thing.

* * *

Fight, fight, fight. For every handhold and foothold and inch. Ten feet has never seemed so high. He doesn’t have the balance or the dexterity of a human, much less an angel because the stolen grace inside him has already taken so many things as payment.

But there’s something blue, something bold, something wonderful in fighting. No, that’s not right. It’s not the fighting or the fighting for, it’s the want. The want to fight, the want to win, the want to have.

Castiel hasn’t allowed himself to want for a terribly long time.

The feeling is so kindly blue it’s painful.

* * *

“Hannah.” Castiel keeps his gaze averted, one hand up to shield his eyes from the spritzing pain he knows will follow if he sees the man.

The man flinches back, mud skittering over the edges of Castiel’s vision, and Castiel flinches with him, his chest shuddering.

Dean breaks forward, wrenching between them, darkly soft and mostly green, taking hold of Cas’s arm and spinning him back to the door. “Cas, I told you not to come in here.”

Castiel keeps talking even as Dean pushes him down the hall and back to the blank room where Castiel should not sleep and not eat and not think and not move. “You wanted another way. Hannah. Hannah can help.”

The green exhales into something even softer. Soft like mud. “Hannah the angel?”

“Yes.” Castiel yanks his arm back, purple all of a sudden and not sure why. “Hannah the angel. What’s wrong with being an angel?”

Dean holds up empty palms, flaring a complacent blue in surprise. “Nothing. It just sounds like you aren’t on good terms with the angels, that’s all.”

“Hannah is my friend.”

“I know.”

“My sister.”

Dean nods, the blue falling darker, half yellow with pity. Ugly, ugly pity. “I know, Cas.”

Castiel is drowning in puce, his skin growling with it. It sinks into a moment of fisted, blue disappointment. He’s half tempted to shove. “No, you don’t.”

A muddy sigh. “Just wait in your room while me and—while we talk about it, okay?” A gentle hand on Cas’s shoulder, pushing and pushing, so awfully yellow and kind.

Castiel peels away from it, hoping to turn it to a familiar crimson. One that he can predict, one that bites. “I hate waiting. Rowena waits.”

Slow, patient yellow. “Everybody waits, Cas.”

A thorn. A red thorn in Castiel’s side, and he feels all too much like a wounded animal. The puce turns acidic. “Why do you hate angels so much?”

There. A flare of red beneath the yellow-green. “Because they’re dicks, that’s why. They’re all dicks. They want to use me, want to use—us, you. That’s all they ever do. They use you up and throw you away and they don’t care who they kill in the process.”

“And humans do care?” Cas growls in bitter, spiteful reply. “They don’t use you up and throw you away?”

A narrowing of green eyes. “What is this about?”

“Nothing, Dean. I’ll wait.” The words are crimson and false. Bitterly so. Rowena waits. Castiel walks.

Dean leaves and Cas walks. Up the hall and into a garage. No crappy car this time. Just an old forgotten Ford that Castiel steals and drives all the way to a tired, empty park.

He’s too useless to know he’s being followed until he moves to open the car door and someone opens the passenger side faster, sliding into the seat and turning Castiel’s fingers stiff with blue.

“How stupid do you think I am?”

Castiel is too taut with blue to respond.

Dean is too thundery green to stop. “You lied to me.”

The blue sinks. “I know.”

“I had to leave _him_ alone with Rowena.”

Castiel’s brows grow taut with a flicker of confusion. “Leave—” The answer comes in a thunderbolt of raw pain down his spine that leaves him shaking. “Oh.”

“You’re not in any fit state to take on heaven alone.”

“I never am.” The tiredness is raw and wounded. “And you never care.”

“Cas.”

“Go back to S—” Another flash of pain, like a blade cutting him clean in half down the bones of his back, starting at the base of his skull and splintering downward. He chokes out a cry of pain but fights through it. “Go back.”

“You go back.”

“You're such a child.”

Dean huffs. “Oh, I’m the child? If anyone so much as mentions my brother’s name—”

The memories are broken, tearing at Castiel, just _tearing_ , white and black and sharp. He flinches out a shuddering whine.

“—you’ll be down for the count. And believe me, they’re gonna mention it.”

“Hannah is my friend.” The pain is lasting longer each time, and Castiel’s muscles are drawn so tight from fighting that he can hardly move, hardly shove the words through his blackly stiff jaw.

“Okay. But she’s not the only one up there. And you’re still recovering from all this Rowena crap, man. You can’t just walk into heaven when half of the inhabitants are out for your blood.”

The thorn is still in his side, the hurt bleeding through his core. “Yes, I can.”

“No, you can’t. They’ll kill you or worse.”

“Then let them kill me.”

Dean stiffens, but his stiffness is strong and bold and dark. “Like hell.”

Cas scoffs. “Don’t pretend you care, Dean, it’s insulting.”

Dean’s green stutters, slipping into a red-blue puce that mirrors Castiel, but far too late. “What are you on about? We just got you back.”

“She _gave_ me back!” The thorn stings and Cas snaps. “Because I’m useless.”

Dean sighs, back to blue and yellow with a sliver of orange guilt. “Oh, you stupid angel. Did she tell you that? Because I promise I’ll punch her for you if she told you that.”

“She didn’t need to tell me, Dean, because _I am not stupid_.”

Dean nods. “You’re right, you’re not. Not stupid enough to take on heaven alone, huh? Let’s go home, we’ll sort this out. And if you really think it’s the best option, we’ll come back and we’ll talk to Hannah, okay? But we’re not gonna do it like this. We’re gonna do it right.”

“I’m doing it myself.”

“Cas, will you stop fighting me on this? Just come home.”

“It’s not my home, Dean. It’s yours. Yours and—ugh—” The word is poison in his throat and lightning down his spine but Castiel wrenches it up and his tongue spits out, “ _Sam’s_.” It burns. Burns and bites and stings and tears and Castiel’s fingers fist whitely around his chest, the cry coming out piece by piece, just as torn as the rest of him. 

“Don’t do that,” Dean says, and something else echoes. His hand finds Castiel’s back, bright with warm blue comfort. “Please don’t do that.”

“I don’t have a home.” Stormy with the gray of something lost.

“Then we’ll fix that too.”


	3. A half-reparation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean and Castiel summon Crowley for help with the memory problems. They have a run-in with angels and Castiel returns to the bunker alone and wounded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a little disappointed with how this chapter turned out but I hope you like it. Lots of Sam and Castiel friendship to come as they work together.

Darkness falls. Dark and black and sallow. 

It’s becoming harder to think and to Castiel, trying to think feels like darkness trying to stand. It doesn’t stand, doesn’t rise like the burning, blistering sun. It sinks and slips, black and full and weighted, knees scraping, fingers sallow, chest cold. It’s painful to be so full. 

Darkness falls. Falls and bleeds and weeps, blackly thick and coldly desperate, fingers clinging to the fading color of the sky. For a moment, darkness knows the warmth of pink and purple and orange. And then it falls and knows only the blandly bitter taste of loss.

There is no blackness here. Only jagged tears of sunbeams and cold bulbs overhead. Two days and it’s only getting worse.

The shaking doesn’t stop, though it’s fallen to an endless shiver. A hazel name coils like a serpent, alien and familiar and venomously painful. Higher than brown, it’s green. Green with the entangled thoughts of Dean.

Dean, ten feet away trying to summon Crowley, but the Winchester is only half there because the taller half is missing. “Stop thinking about it,” Dean says. 

_ It _ . There’s no it, just him. Another shivered shudder. “I can’t.” Castiel covers his eyes with his hands, hoping for the light to stop assaulting him. There’s a snake slithering beneath his skin and venom permeating every pore, burning and writhing and scraping. So brown it’s green, so green it’s brown. 

“He—” Agony flooding Castiel’s spine. “It,” he corrects, because  _ it _ hurts less. “It’s all tangled up with you. The way you move, the way you talk, the clothes you wear. You, you... and  _ it _ . It’s in every step, in every word, in every shift of plaid and thud of boots. I can’t stop seeing it.”

Dean swears so lowly that the sound crawls like darkness across the floor. “Why didn’t you tell me that?” He peels off his flannel shirt, leaving only a kind, black tee beneath. The flannel flies across the room and falls into a corner and something of  _ it  _ falls too. Boots follow. Anger so green it’s brown. “If I’d known my presence was hurting you, I would have left you in the car.”

Cas shivers out another slithering shudder. “The car is worse, so much worse.” 

“Then tell me that! We could have taken a different car!”

Crowley is the cool dryness of a desert sunrise when he appears, flaring over Castiel’s senses and distracting him from brutal thoughts of  _ it.  _ “I hope you didn’t call just to kill me, squirrel, I’d be awfully disappointed.”

“Should’ve gone with Hannah,” Cas mutters, but there’s something of uncoiled green relief in his tone as the serpent stills.

Dean ignores Castiel, focusing instead on Crowley, his presence and posture suddenly as large as an overcast sky. “Memory problem. Can you fix it?”

A prickle of green interest tilts Crowley’s forward, focus stinging through his pupils as he fails to bury the greed. “What kind of problem?” His gaze flicks sharply around the room. “And where’s your moose? He’s not hiding in the shadows with the colt, is he? Because I’m afraid that would put a bit of a damper on things.”

At _ moose _ , Cas barely chokes back a whine. His fingers fist at his scalp, his eyes pinching shut against the flare of biting, bruising brightness across his memory.

Dean shifts to hide him from view but too late.

Wealth. A dividend of blistering information slowly drawing a smile onto Crowley’s lips. “Now that’s interesting. What, did mother dearest set Sam on the little angel? Tear out the moose’s memory while she was at it?”

A choke floods Castiel’s throat. His body shudders forward, flinching off the table and shuddering toward the floor. He just manages to catch himself on shivering legs while a bolt of pain impales every nerve ending. 

“So where is Sam? Run off, has he?”

This time, Cas doesn’t catch himself. He scrapes his knees on the concrete floor, the whine tearing from him. His fingers cling to his chest but the pain clings just as tight and  _ it won’t let go _ .

“Stop talking about him.” Dean is simmering and raring for a fight like a flash of lightning for thunder, defensively purple and violently peach.

Crowley narrows his eyes and drifts into a dry desert sand. A spiteful dust storm of cactus spines. “Sam, Sam, Sam.”

Dean slams forward, a gun wrenching from his side, his finger teetering precariously over the trigger. “One more word and this devil’s trap goes straight between your eyes. And don’t think I won’t because if I bring Rowena your head she owes me a favor and plan B ain’t so bad.”

Crowley purses his lips and glares.

The gun stays high, thundering green. “How you doin’, Cas?”

The shivers are worse now, wracking and full-bodied. Shakily, Castiel pushes back to his knees, his voice hoarse. “I think we should have gone with Hannah.”

“If this doesn’t pan out, we will, alright? But we can’t risk it until we know we don’t have a choice. Now go wait in the car while I talk this out with Crowley, get your breath back.”

“The car hurts. I hate the car.”

“You didn’t tell me that!!” Dean snaps, but then his voice and form slide into gray, clouded with concern. “Wait out back, then.”

Castiel finishes shoving to his feet, tired of being treated like a child but also tired of the pain and the vulnerability  _ it  _ brings, especially with a prickly green Crowley who seems to have inherited his mother’s penchant for waiting like a vulture to feed. “Fine.”

“Do not call Hannah.”

Halfway out the door, bristling with the bellowed demand and implied mistrust, Castiel rolls his shoulders up into unflinching blue. “You can’t stop me.”

Dean’s gun arm wobbles as he half-turns his head, all trace of brownness gone, his focus stolen from Crowley. “Cas!  _ Do not call Hannah _ . You agreed to try this first.”

Castiel had no intention of calling her, though truthfully he is now considering it. “Fine!”

The waver steadies, Dean’s head spinning to lock onto the King of Hell though he throws back another command. “And stop thinking about it!”

“I  _ can’t! _ ” Outside now, and Castiel slams the door. The sound of the frame as it cracks is bruised and purple.

_ "Try!" _ bleeds through the wood, and what follows is not meant for Castiel’s ears.

But Dean forgets that Castiel is an angel. A set of walls won’t stop him from hearing.

Crowley’s grit is easily recognized, a little too pleased and comfortable, a little too grayly green. Too easily green. “So… are you going to point out the moose in the room or shall I?”

Moose is somewhere between he and it; more mild, less spitting, still brown and sharp.

Dean is gray, looming with the threat of a storm. “Can you fix memory problems? Yes? Or no?”

Blandly mocking, dully sharp, distantly close. Like water behind a wall of spines. “Depends on the source of the problem. A hit to the head? Sure. Witch magic? ...Maybe.” 

“What about other kinds of magic?”

“Did you meet a pagan?” Crowley bristles, irascible but dryly so. “ You’re going to have to be more specific here.” 

A growling, drumming, roaring heartbeat of pause, gray with might and purpose. “An angel,” Dean replies, deliberate. 

“Seraph, archangel, cupid?”

“Does it matter? Just a regular old run of the mill angel.”

“And whose memory am I fixing?” Crowley waits like a cactus in the desert, wealthy in the midst of dust and dryness and even captured, he seems to have the upper hand.

The demon strikes a defensive nerve and Dean grows foggily venomous. “Does it matter?” he repeats, more coarsely than before. Silver—steel, maybe—crawls into the storm of his voice. 

There are too many layers of conversation for Castiel to know who is conquering who

The unbreachable green of wealth. “If it’s Sam’s, or another human’s, it’s no problem. Just a snap of the fingers as long as there are no archangels involved. But if it’s your pet’s, and I’m guessing it is... not so easy.”

Dean is the gray-green of something else. Something thundery and loyal. “But can you do it?”

“Well,  _ some _ angels like to experiment. I’m sure you remember expelling Gadreel. Methods like that are… ‘fixable’, if we use the same methods to undo it. Painful and long, but manageable. Other methods, not so much. So, did they use the crown of thorns or do we have to continue this torturous discussion?”

The sound of wingbeats never comes. Cannot. Metatron made sure of that. Instead it’s a roll of tires and a groan of metal when the angels pull up in a car and Castiel has this terrible urge to ask them what it was like the way Lucifer once asked him. To ask if they find the vehicles confining, as he did then, or comforting, as he does now. 

Instead, he stands, all green sounds of Crowley and Dean lost behind him. Shielded by a set of doors and a long-fallen angel that can’t quite fight the shudders. He lets his voice boom, blue and brittle and tired. There is no greeting, not today. He is too tired and hurt for that, has only the will to give Dean a booming warning. “You have no business here. Go back. Go  _ live _ .”

“Cas?” Dean’s voice reaches Castiel only because Castiel is angel enough to hear it. 

“Oops.” Crowley’s voice is the coarse, unwelcome taste of sand. “Did you know that devil’s traps don’t stop prayers?”

Dean swears. He is thundering toward the door even as the angels are sliding over the dirt, purple anger starving in their eyes. 

“Castiel,” one says, and Castiel barely bothers to find their name. Beriel. He has chosen a tall vessel; a woman with a tattoo across the side of her face. And Castiel wonders why his brother didn’t use his grace to cleanse the skin only a moment before he catches the sharp white glimpse of tattered wings. “We’ve been looking for you.”

Beriel’s grace is grayly frayed. Gray like the pallor of death. 

Castiel’s falls to wariness, sympathy warring with fear. “Your grace...”

The vessel gives a wry, unflinching smile. “I tried to open the gates. But the barrier around heaven was… unkind.”

Another slip of anger, another fall to something less, something too tired to care if it survives. “I’m sorry.”

“Not enough,” says Beriel, bruised and black. “Not yet. If it’s possible, you’ll get it open. And if it’s not, then we’ll see you shatter on the doors you locked.” The sort of black that comes from years of scraped knees and palms, from eons of hoping for something better, something brighter, something higher, only to learn that it cannot be reached. And if he cannot reach the sun, he will find weak earth and dig instead. Will bury all glimpses of light. It is a bitter, dirt stained black.

“Metatron’s portal—”

“Won’t let the souls through. I thought you were supposed to care about humans, Castiel. They’re all stuck here. The ones the demons haven’t stolen, anyway. And without the souls, heaven is dying.” His head cants, almost mockingly. “Haven’t you noticed?”

The angels beside him, Sariah and Jehosephett, they lack the gray pallor but their grace is fizzling and small and heaven’s frailness is all too clear. 

Theo flickers as he bites. The flicker burns.

Dean wrenches the door open. “Cas!?” 

“Dean.”

Jehosephett’s blade sings as it falls to her hand. She is the black of dilated pupils, of brutal fullness. And she is eager, Castiel can tell, to wreak vengeance; the pennied mountain of grief only making her taller. As though she is a monument to all the wrong that Castiel has ever done to an angel. To trillions and trillions of angels.

Sariah is simply a tired gray. Her blade makes a low, dull thud into her palm. “For once,” she says, her pale gaze on Dean though a man’s gray-blue eyes stare out from the vessel, “our fight is not with you. Forfeit the traitor and you are free to leave.”

Shoulders bristle up, clouded and fierce and unflinching. “Cas, get behind me.”

“Dean—”

“Get. Behind me.”

Dean is in socks and a t-shirt and Castiel can feel the uncomfortable vulnerability. The buried blue regret and guilt for bringing Cas out here, for not taking further measures against Crowley, for thinking things might go okay for once.

Castiel stays at Dean’s side, even matching his step when Dean tries to pass in front of him. His angel blade hums, worn and familiar, to his hand, and his fingers fist around it.

“Winchesters,” Jehosephett sneers. It comes out like a smoldering, black curse.

But Dean is only half because the taller half is missing and Castiel flinches backward, his grip fumbling.

Beriel’s dirt black gaze swallows the movement and his mind chews to find the taste. “Interesting.”

Seizing the opportunity, Dean has placed a shuddering Castiel firmly behind him. “Leave him alone, it’s Metatron you want.”

“Metatron, we have.” Sariah frowns at Castiel. “What we want, Castiel stole from us. Burned from us.”

“We’re here,” Jehosephett says, heavy and black and mountainous, “to repay the favor.”

The banishing sigil is what comes to mind, and Castiel, half hidden behind Dean, makes a thin slice across his shivering palm. He starts to draw on his sleeve, chest tautly mauve with the thought that it is dishonorable.

Beriel straightens through a sigh. “Heaven is falling, Castiel. There must be retribution. It will be less painful if you come quietly.”

A tall step carries Jehosephett closer. “It will also be less satisfying.”

“Back off,” Dean snaps, electrified and looming, his stance a pale, defensive purple. He prays, must, because the words come thundering through.  _ Cas, you get to the car and you drive and you don’t stop until you hit bunker. _

“No,” Castiel replies aloud, and this time, it’s not out of spite. It’s a spinning, blue-yellow selfishness instead. A want to fight. For himself and for Dean. 

“Dammit, Cas.”

The sigil is almost finished. 

But the angels take Castiel’s ‘no’ as a response to coming quietly and Jehosephett is the first to sting forward.

Dean blocks Jehosephett but Sariah slips around his defenses and swings her sword at Cas, Beriel right behind her.

When Castiel ducks out from under Sariah’s blade and catches Beriel’s, the other angel leans in close. “Crowley has a message for you,” he hisses. “ _ Sam _ .”

Castiel’s grip falters, his feet skittering in a futile attempt to escape the onslaught. Beriel presses his advantage and stabs forward.

Though shuddering, Castiel manages to partly parry the blow, keeping it from piercing his chest and forcing it to down his stomach instead. But instead of piercing skin, it pierces paper.

Bites into the flesh of a stolen book, and for a bright, ghastly coiled breath, it feels wretchedly wrong. Like a waylaid weight of abuse falling atop a kindly, innocent thing and crushing it beyond recognition.

And then the blade sinks all the way through the pages and stabs Castiel. 

And sticks.

Beriel yanks on the blade but it doesn’t come free of the book. 

Castiel is hard-pressed to overcome his surprise fast enough to parry Sariah’s next blow. She spies the mostly finished sigil on his sleeve and scowls. “Would you be so cruel?”

Dean is battling Jehosephett, slashing her arm when he can reach nothing else. She sucks in a blackly sharp breath and her attack intensifies.

Beriel, now devoid of his blade, waits for the opportune moment to seize Castiel’s sword-arm and fight to steal his. When Beriel finds himself failing to overpower, the angel growls through gritted teeth, “Sam, Sam, Sam,” and wrenches the blade from Castiel’s fingers while he’s caught in the wracking throes of fragmented memory.

“Cas!” Dean manages to twist a blade past Jehosephett’s block and it bursts into her chest just below her collarbone. Even before she falls, Dean is shoving toward Beriel and Castiel. He’s halted by Sariah. 

“This was not your fight,” she says, tired and gray even as she swings for his throat. 

Beriel forces Castiel down, stabbing into his shoulder and then slamming a fist to his face.

Prickly green footsteps sound behind Castiel and Beriel slows to a stop where he’s striking the fallen angel. Beriel straightens. “Crowley.”

“You were supposed to free me  _ first _ ,” Crowley spits. “ _ Then _ you could have your little throw-down.”

Behind the King of Hell falls a fluttering of wingbeats; an almost glimpse of grace before it is gone. A forest green glimpse.

“You’ve been stealing souls," Beriel replies, still holding Castiel in a fisted grip. "Why would I free you?”

“Information, a trade, a  _ deal _ , if you will. The one we made!” Irascible. Dryly, scorchingly so.

Beriel bristles and straightens again. “We don’t deal with demons.”

Crowley growls. His eyes roll heavenward. “Is it so difficult to find decent partners these days? Fine.” He vanishes in a billow of black smoke and then reappears at Castiel’s side, shoving Beriel backwards and gripping Castiel’s arm. He nearly wrenches it from the socket, pulling it close while Castiel yanks against him. “Calm yourself, angel, this will only hurt a moment.” Crowley sinks his fingers into Castiel’s bloody shoulder and uses the stain on his fingers to finish the sigil.

The whole movement is lightning fast and before Beriel is even done staggering to regain his balance, Crowley is forcing Castiel’s other hand to press the rune. The King of Hell watches dryly as the angels vanish in bursts of light. “You stab my back, I stab yours.”

Castiel tugs his limbs free, glaring up warily, wondering why the demon wouldn’t banish him as well.

Crowley raises his eyebrows. “What? Now we’re even again.”

But it only takes a moment for Castiel to find what’s missing. “Dean, Crowley.”

“So he got tied up and tagged along, not my fault. He shouldn’t have grabbed her arm to force her back.”

“Crowley.”

“He’ll be fine, he always is. Bloody impossible to get rid of those Winchesters, and I should know. Nightmare in flannel those two.”

His memory seizes. A flinch and a shudder and a white-knuckled hope for quick relief. When Castiel finds his senses, Crowley is gone.

* * *

He’d call it falling, but a fall implies less intentional forward motion. His feet skitter drunkenly, heavily, rottedly, down the stairs, his torso coiled tight, his hands fisted around the bulk in his coat.

“Dean?” A hazel voice with hazel footsteps, flaring warm with sickly worry.

The word that follows, Castiel thinks, is an echo of someone else. The skitter slips and crashes, buried beneath a scraping, tectonic shift. Pain slithers and pools—a pound of oil and punch of mud, his mind screaming out a sound so white it’s black. His spine clacks onto the steps and he just lays there with a shuddering jaw, a whine tortured out in response.

Sa—he— _ It _ swears. And again, Castiel whines. His hand shakes and spasms, clacking against the silver three-sided sword that sunk so recently through a book and into skin. A fresh sort of pain knocks to let him know it’s there, much more bloody than the first.

Castiel hears the footsteps trail closer and has the wherewithal to turn his head the other way to avert his gaze.

The swear is faster, rougher, oranger. “What happened? Where’s Dean?”

Castiel shakes and shudders, his vision flaring white, and then beyond, the edges sinking into black. He can’t parse out a reply. Can barely cling to consciousness.

It growls softly, more in pain and panic than anything else. “I need to know where Dean is, I can’t  _ help _ you.” He’s moving closer, and Castiel can smell the very essence of him, every greater detail screaming greater pain.

“Stop,” Cas chokes out on his next whine, though it hardly sounds like a word. “Please stop.”

The footsteps cut off. But a hazel hum pulses from their last location. Pulses and flies and stabs.

Castiel tries for another word, isn’t sure if he punches out, “Took him,” or “Taken,” just that he gets the message across because the half hazel orange suddenly melts into a sickly, sallow yellow churning with white.

“I can’t...” A breath of resolve makes the melted yellow harden. The footsteps clack and crack and  _ wrack _ their way across the floor. 

The touch is not as painful as Castiel was expecting. But the words are agony tenfold. “I’m sorry, Cas.”

A fist slams through the blackly white edges of Castiel’s vision and the whole world falls. 

Calms.

He wakes wrapped in bandages and bed sheets, the room brazenly empty.

But there is a twice-stabbed book sitting mutedly on a little brown table just beside him and a barrage of urgency shoots toward his chest.  _ Dean. _

The spritzing of Theo’s grace is hideously reminiscent of laughter. It charges Castiel’s wounds and bites instead of soothes.

Castiel shoves up regardless. He swings his legs over the edge of the bed and his gaze settles on his shirt, suit coat, tie, and jacket, all kindly draped over the back of a tired chair in a distant corner. His shoes sit on the ground beneath them.

Trying to think about how they got there is like darkness trying to stand. Castiel doesn’t think about it. Can’t.

He knows he is in the bunker. Dean’s bunker. In the same room where he is meant to not move and not think and not eat and not…

His head tilts, his fingers smoothing down the corner of the blanket. 

Not sleep.

His muscles ache and Theo bites but Castiel finds his feet and crosses the room to don his clothing, more because he feels odd without it than from any sense of chill or need to be decent.

He fumbles with the tie, never having tied it before, not really. He leaves it hanging around his shoulders after a few failed attempts. 

_ It  _ went after Dean. Rescued or is rescuing. 

Surely. 

The halls are familiar to wander, though they echo with hazel stabs. The ache and pull of his wound is green with disappointment and blue with blanketing failure. The colors war together like churlish waves in a spiteful sea. 

Finding voices is a pyrrhic victory. A whitely dreaded discovery. 

_ It _ didn’t leave to rescue Dean. It stayed, and it’s voice rings out with a hollow, muddied, hazel hope. “—to show me where they were, that’s all.”

Rowena—and it is the witch, no other voice holds that much counterfeit concern—hums like the ashy embers of a fire about to roar back into flame. “I might have something.”

Castiel only really hears half of the conversation, too assaulted by flailing, jagged memories to understand what  _ it _ says, only that it is speaking and it is drowning in dark, cobalt depths.

He doesn’t actually hear much of the conversation at all. The sound of Sam’s voice has his knees quailing beneath him and he slides to the ground while a venomous serpent slithers like oil and mud through his veins.

“It will dull the pain,” Rowena clicks. “It won’t dull the damage.”

The lost response sends him from his knees to his side, every breath in his lungs wrung right out of him. 

Rowena clicks another clack. “You will have to untie me, you know. Now, preferably. I’m sure you want to find wee, little Dean before he’s ravaged.”

Cobalt depths, and hazel ringing, a shift like the clattering start of a rockslide. The response is small, and Castiel just manages to catch it. “No.”

“Pardon me?”

“That’s not good enough. You fix it, all of it, or you stay down here and rot.” 

Rowena sputters. “I can’t just—”

“Then find another way because without a cure-all, I won’t risk you anywhere near Cas.”

Footsteps, wracking and heavy as they approach, draw to a halt just outside the doorway where Castiel is clearly visible curled on his side on the ground.

The swear is more a sigh than a swear.

“Thank you,” Castiel says. He’d hadn’t realized until he was hearing her crimson, oily click, but the thought of her touching him, spelling him, using him to get whatever it is she’s after when he only just got free of her… had been more than mildly unsettling. More than mildly terrifying. “I’d rather Rowena didn’t…” he trails off, not sure what he’d meant to say, trying to talk without really thinking at all because any thinking leads to  _ it  _ and  _ it _ leads to pain. “Thank you.”

Silence graces his ears, a relieving lack of spritzing torment, however unintentional.

The touch is not painful, not like the voice or the face or the footsteps. Perhaps because he and  _ it _ rarely touch; because the touch doesn’t hold memories. A hand on Castiel’s back and another on his arm drawing him upward, hesitant at first, barely brushing, much less pressing or holding, but when Castiel doesn’t respond except to gather his legs beneath him, the touch grows less wary.

A hesitant voice follows once both men are standing, cutting off almost as quickly as it starts, “Are you—”

Castiel’s knees shudder and buckle, his torso shivering, and the hand on his arm tightens, another slithering around his side even as teeth clack closed over Cas’s shoulder.

Castiel has to wait for the surge to subside before he can steady and speak. “The talking is… stressful,” he provides. “The sound of your voice—”

A spasm of full-fisted, clacking pain spins from a half-rotted echo of memory.  _ Drunkenness, trying and failing to swallow his misery, the world heightened and dulled in painful ways, tugging Sam’s collar to draw him close. “I find the sound of your voice grating.” _

It tears through him and by the time it’s done, Castiel is on the floor again, sitting half-propped up, a faceless hand squeezing his shoulder, heavy with hesitance.

Castiel’s voice is raspy and light—like there’s hardly enough air to form the words. “I should probably refrain from thinking about it,” he notes tiredly. 

Another squeeze, and then the faceless form is moving from behind him, pulling away in utter silence.

“Don’t. I’m alright when you’re not talking, I just need to stop thinking about it.”

The form falls to stillness, half pulled away, half propping.

That’s what Dean said; stop thinking about it.

“It’s my fault they took him, the angels. They wanted me, they were after  _ me _ .”

The hand is back on his shoulder, wrenchingly brown where it sits between comfort and hope.

“I couldn’t fight them on my own, not when I was—when I’m—” Castiel gestures vaguely to himself, legs splayed on the floor, his whole form shivering every few moments with some strange sort of after-shake. “I would have gone to Hannah but Dean made me promise and I am tired of breaking promises, so I thought perhaps  _ we _ could save him. Together. Or at least  _ you _ could…”

The  _ you _ hurts more than the  _ we _ did, and Castiel sucks in a lungful of sharpness while his limbs twitch through an aftershock. He shoves through it, throat straining. “ _ You could— _ ” but now he’s thinking about it and a hand soothes down his spine while Castiel shakes. 

He’ll focus on himself then, if the fractures won’t let him do otherwise. “I can be bait or you can leave me to rot with Rowena or let her... They want me, maybe they’d be willing to trade, that would be easiest. And I think I’d rather that than Rowena—” The shivered shudder, this time, has nothing to do with the form behind him.

A hand grabs Castiel’s arm, turns it palm up, and starts tracing.  _ No. _

“No to which option?”

_ Together _ .

Castiel’s limbs and chest grow thick with peach hurt, though no pain shoots down his spine and no shudder overtakes him. “Oh.” He wonders what the thing—person—person works fine, just as vague but a little more kind—what the person means to do with Castiel. Bait or barter or throw him like scraps to the witch or something worse.

The hand feels him stiffening and traces out, ‘ _ Yes together.’ _

But Castiel just stiffens a little more because now he is confused as well as wary.

The person is patient despite the forced slowness of tracing out each letter and the buried blue urgency in finding Dean.  _ ‘Where will they take him?’ _

Castiel does what he should have done five hours ago and tunes into angel radio. 

Sorting through the vitriol is bright and unpleasant, but Castiel finds what he’s looking for quickly enough.

He falls to a muddied, cheapened, slush-like gray. “Heaven. Dean’s in heaven.”


End file.
